Name: Bruce
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Restoring Meaningful Energy Performance to the AIA CoTE Top Ten Awards
April 30th, 2009The AIA Top Ten sustainable buildings award has been a beacon for 12 years, but many of the latest crop of celebrants are not sufficiently deserving of the accolade, because they are mediocre in their energy performance. This is an award intended to honor excellence in sustainable design, but the three cold climate winners, for example, report total annual energy usages of 62, 68 and 79 KBtu/sf/annum. These are two or three times the consumption of what the best buildings are now achieving in this climate. Two or three times!! — not at all inspiring, and hardly sustainable, even by the present laxness of the definition, and nowhere near where the leading projects need to be today if we are to have any hope of meeting the 2030 Challenge. And the trend is downward. Last year (2008) had five cold climate awardees with total annual energy useages (TAEU) of 28, 40, 34, 53, 33 KBtu/sf/year. As noted above, this years cold climate awardees TAEU of 62, 68, 79 KBtu/sf/year
….. the worst performer last year was 10 points better than this year’s best!!! Not a good trend.
We understand that design elegance and enchantment are important – as important as verified high performance. Ten years ago, our concern that green building design in this country was being reduced to a checklist of features drove one of us (Bruce, in company with NESEA colleagues Marc Rosenbaum, Andy Shapiro and Nadav Malin) to Europe to visit and report on the fusion of design elegance and performance that was then evident on that side of the Atlantic. For years afterward — initially as an inaugural Public Forum at the 2001 BE conference — using this body of work, we repeatedly made the case for green Architecture with a capital ‘A’ (rather than a capital ‘G’). But now the pendulum seems to have swung back too far.
In the coming decade we are facing two enormous global changes: galloping climate change and the advent of global peak oil production. Each threatens our global and national security in new and profound ways that will push us harder and harder toward national energy independence requiring harnessing renewable sources and previously untenable levels of consciousness regarding energy efficiency. The AIA, through the leadership of Ed Mazria et al, has made a noble and conspicuous commitment to have the architectural profession be a major player in this heroic transition. In connection with this ambition, the Top Ten cannot afford to be populated with mediocre performers — it is a travesty that demeans the program and diminishes the stature of the AIA as a serious promoter of its 2030 Challenge. Top Ten accolades ought to be given to those projects that achieve BOTH, not one or the other. That was why this award was special.
Let’s push the AIA to restore that specialness.
